Re: UTF-8 and case-insensitivity

H. Peter Anvin
2004-02-18T03:15:36Z

Linus Torvalds wrote:
>
> On Wed, 18 Feb 2004, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
>
>>Well, we don't want to support a bunch of hacks to make it behave like
>>Windows if what Windows does doesn't make sense.
>
>
> I'd disagree, for a very simple reason: case-insensitivity itself simply
> does not make sense, so the _only_ reason for having a bunch of hacks is
> literally to support windows file exports and nothing else.
>
> I obviously agree with the fact that we should _not_ put those hacks into
> the VFS layer proper - we should keep them as a separate thing, and we
> should make it clear that it makes no sense _except_ for Windows
> compatibility.
>
> Think of it as nothing more than a binary compatibility layer, the same
> way we have hooks to support "lcall 7,0" for binary compatibility with
> some silly (and much less interesting) x86 OSes through external modules.
>

Well, this is also true :) I still say it belongs in userspace.

For 100% bug-compatibility with Windows, though, it is probably
worthwhile to have the filename in the native filesystem be not what a
Windows user would see, but rather the normalized filename. That makes
a userspace implementation much easier.

-hpa